Unobservable Entities Research Articles

‘You Could Call It Magic’: What Parents and Siblings Tell Preschoolers About Unobservable Entities

How can we explain children's understanding of the unseen world? Young children are generally able to distinguish between real unobservable entities and fantastical ones, but they attribute different characteristics to and show less confidence in their decisions about fantastical entities generally endorsed by adults, such as Santa Claus. One explanation for these conceptual differences is that the testimony children hear from others about unobservable entities varies in meaningful ways. Although this theory has some experimental support, its viability in actual conversation has yet to be investigated. Study 1 sought to examine this question in parent–child conversation and showed that parents provide similar types of content information when talking to children about both real entities and entities that they generally endorse. However, parents use different pragmatic cues when they communicate about endorsed entities than they do when talking about real ones. Study 2 showed that older siblings used discourse strategies similar to those used by parents when talking to young children about unobservable entities. These studies indicate that the types of cues children use to form their conceptions of unobservable entities are present in naturalistic conversations with others, supporting a role for testimony in children's early beliefs.

Data Fabrication and Falsification and Empiricist Philosophy of Science

Scientists have rules pertaining to data fabrication and falsification that are enforced with significant punishments, such as loss of funding, termination of employment, or imprisonment. These rules pertain to data that describe observable and unobservable entities. In this commentary I argue that scientists would not adopt rules that impose harsh penalties on researchers for data fabrication or falsification unless they believed that an aim of scientific research is to develop true theories and hypotheses about entities that exist, including unobservable ones. This argument presents a challenge for constructive empiricists, such as van Fraassen. Constructive empiricists need to be able to explain why rules pertaining to data fabrication and falsification do not threaten their philosophy of science.

Epistemic similarities between students' scientific and supernatural beliefs.

The evidential support for scientific claims is quantitatively and qualitatively superior to that for supernatural claims, yet students may not appreciate this difference in light of the fact that both types of claims are learned in similar ways (through testimony rather than firsthand observation) and perform similar functions (explaining observed phenomena in terms of unobservable entities). The present study addressed this issue by comparing students' scientific beliefs with their supernatural beliefs along 4 dimensions of epistemic import: personal confidence, perceived consensus, means of justification, and openness to revision. Participants' scientific beliefs were strongly differentiated from their supernatural beliefs along the dimensions of confidence and consensus but only weakly differentiated along the dimensions of justification and revision, particularly for participants with (a) higher levels of supernatural belief and (b) lower levels of understanding of the nature of science. Moreover, participants' confidence in both types of beliefs was associated with their consensus estimates but not with their ability to cite evidence in support of, or potentially in conflict with, those beliefs. These findings imply that many students' scientific beliefs are qualitatively similar to their supernatural beliefs, despite self-perceptions to the contrary.

Mentalism Versus Behaviourism in Economics: A Philosophy-of-Science Perspective

Behaviourism is the view that preferences, beliefs, and other mental states in social-scientific theories are auxiliary constructs re-describing people's behavioural dispositions. Mentalism is the view that they capture real phenomena, no less existent than the unobservable entities and properties in the natural sciences, such as electrons and electromagnetic fields. While behaviourism has long gone out of fashion in psychology and linguistics, it remains the dominant orthodoxy in economics, especially in the form of 'revealed preference' theory. We aim to (i) clear up some common conceptual confusions about the two views in economics, (ii) situate the debate in a broader historical and philosophical context, and (iii) defend a mentalist approach to economics. Setting aside normative concerns about behaviourism, we show that mentalism is in line with best scientific practice even if economics is treated as a purely positive science of human social behaviour. We distinguish mentalism from, and reject, the radical neuroeconomic view that social behaviour should be explained in terms of people's brain processes, as distinct from their mental states.

Scientific Realism and Ontological Relativity

The preeminent question of the metaphysics of classification is that of whether the world is itself naturally subdivided into kinds of things. Are kinds out there, so to speak, or are they rather artefacts of convention, existing only insofar as classificatory practices are brought to bear by creatures such as ourselves? In this paper, I examine this question from the point of view of the sciences, and more specifically, from the perspec tive of the most fulsome view of the epistemic credentials of the sciences regarding what's 'out there': scientific realism. As I hope to show, ap proaching the metaphysics of classification from the perspective of scientific realism has important consequences for one's very understanding of the perspective itself. Thus, by considering the nature of kinds from this per spective, I aim to shed light not only on the metaphysics of classification, but also on the nature of realism with respect to scientific knowledge. Scientific realism (simply 'realism', henceforth, unless otherwise indicated) is the view that our best scientific theories are true, or approx imately true, or to put it in terms other than truth, that they describe well, or to some significant degree of success, the ontology of parts of the world. There are explicit caveats built into this coarse definition ('best' theories, 'approximate' truth, 'significant degrees' of success), and I will make no attempt to expound these particular qualifications here. A further clarification of the definition, however, furnishes a central motivation for what follows. Realism is often explicated in terms of three sorts of com mitment: a metaphysical commitment to the existence of a mind-inde pendent reality; a semantic commitment to interpret scientific claims literally (or as it is often put, at face value); and an epistemological commitment to regard these claims as furnishing knowledge of both ob servable and unobservable entities and processes. After the demise of

Structuralism in Phylogenetic Systematics

Systematics based solely on structuralist principles is non-science because it is derived from first principles that are inconsistent in dealing with both synchronic and diachronic aspects of evolution, and its evolutionary models involve hidden causes, and unnameable and unobservable entities. Structuralist phylogenetics emulates axiomatic mathematics through emphasis on deduction, and “hypotheses” and “mapped trait changes” that are actually lemmas and theorems. Sister-group-only evolutionary trees have no caulistic element of scientific realism. This results in a degenerate systematics based on patterns of fact or evidence being treated as so fundamental that all other data may be mapped to the cladogram, resulting in an apparently well-supported classification that is devoid of evolutionary theory. Structuralism in systematics is based on a non-ultrametric analysis of sister-group informative data that cannot detect or model a named taxon giving rise to a named taxon, resulting in classifications that do not reflect macroevolutionary changes unless they are sister lineages. Conservation efforts are negatively affected through epistemological extinction of scientific names. Evolutionary systematics is a viable alternative, involving both deduction and induction, hypothesis and theory, developing trees with both synchronic and diachronic dimensions often inferring nameable ancestral taxa, and resulting in classifications that advance evolutionary theory and explanations for particular groups.

Is Waltz a Realist?

In the opening chapter of Theory of International Politics Waltz makes an interesting distinction between scientific laws and theory construction. Recent special issues of this journal have suggested that this distinction allows Waltz to be read in different ways — for example, as a scientific realist who conceives of unobservable entities, or as a constructivist interested in how we create models. This contribution argues against both these interpretations by analysing the first chapter of Waltz’s book and suggesting that his distinction between theories and law-like statements is fully consistent with mainstream discussions in the philosophy of social science. It argues that Waltz’s position still depends on the identification of empirical regularities, something that makes him an empirical realist, but which undermines the claim that he is a scientific realist.

A coherent collection in defense of realism

In this collection of essays, Stathis Psillos continues the defense of scientific realism that he began in his Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth (Routledge 1999). As in the earlier book, Psillos understands scientific realism as the combination of a robust metaphysical outlook and an attitude of epistemic optimism. The former amounts to the thesis that our efforts to conceptualize the world do not make any non-conceptual (in particular causal) contributions to it; the world, as it is sometimes said, is ‘mind-independent’. The epistemic optimism consists in the belief that the aforementioned efforts are by and large successful, and this not only insofar as the observable world is concerned: thanks to modern science, we have also been successful in charting, at least to a considerable extent, the unobservable entities and processes that underlie the observable phenomena. Much of Psillos’ 1999 book was concerned with defending—and clarifying the scope of—a robust epistemic optimism. Already in that book he criticized those who hold that we are only in the position to fathom the structure of the unobservable world—be it because of epistemic limitations on our part, or be it on metaphysical grounds, because structure is all there is. His new book contains essays providing further reasons for believing that there is more to the world than structure, and that we can be optimistic that this ‘non-structure’, too, is within our epistemic reach, at least in principle. Our putative warrant for this optimism is to come from the reliability of scientific method, in particular from what Psillos regards as the cornerstone of that method: Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE). In Scientific Realism, he gave a thorough defense of this rule against the backdrop of

Oxygen and the Soul: Children's Conception of Invisible Entities

Abstract In two studies, children's concepts of various types of ordinarily unobservable entities were examined. Study 1 confirmed earlier findings in showing that children aged 4–9 years are confident of the existence of scientific entities such as germs as well as religious beings such as God. At the same time, both age groups are skeptical of the existence of various mythical beings such as mermaids. In Study 2, older children aged 10–12 years were probed for their concepts of religious as compared to scientific phenomena. Despite considerable confidence in each type, older children differentiated between them, both with respect to their level of confidence and their pattern of justification.

On Reichenbach’s argument for scientific realism

The aim of this paper is to articulate, discuss in detail and criticise Reichenbach’s sophisticated and complex argument for scientific realism. Reichenbach’s argument has two parts. The first part aims to show how there can be reasonable belief in unobservable entities, though the truth of claims about them is not given directly in experience. The second part aims to extent the argument of the first part to the case of realism about the external world, conceived of as a world of independently existing entities distinct from sensations. It is argued that the success of the first part depends on a change of perspective, where unobservable entities are viewed as projective complexes vis-a-vis their observable symptoms, or effects. It is also argued that there is an essential difference between the two parts of the argument, which Reichenbach comes (somewhat reluctantly) to accept.

The Pregnancy of the Real: A Phenomenological Defense of Experimental Realism

This paper develops a phenomenological defense of Ian Hacking's experimental realism about unobservable entities in physical science, employing historically undervalued resources from the phenomenological tradition in order to clarify the warrant for our ontological commitments in science. Building upon the work of Husserl, Merleau‐Ponty and Heelan, the paper provides a phenomenological correction of the positivistic conception of perceptual evidence maintained by antirealists such as van Fraassen, the experimental relevance of which is illustrated through a phenomenological interpretation of the 1974 discovery of the J/ψ particle generally regarded as evidence for the charmed quark. The argument then turns to address known problems in Hacking's account, demonstrating that his own instrumentalist criterion of the real is inadequately rooted in the phenomenology of perception, and as a result, passes over the true ontological significance of experimental phenomena. The paper maintains that the proper criterion, only indirectly related to instrumentality, is the distinctive style of the real encountered in perception: empirical pregnancy. With this notion and Merleau‐Ponty's associated reversibility thesis, I show that the phenomenological tradition provides insights into the warrant for our realist commitments that have yet to be adequately acknowledged by philosophers of science.

William James, ‘The World Of Sense’ and Trust in Testimony

: William James argued that we ordinarily think of the objects that we can observe—things that belong to ‘the world of sense’—as having an unquestioned reality. However, young children also assert the existence of entities that they cannot ordinarily observe. For example, they assert the existence of germs and souls. The belief in the existence of such unobservable entities is likely to be based on children’s broader trust in other people’s testimony about objects and situations that they cannot directly observe for themselves.

The Argument from Underconsideration as Grounds for Anti‐realism: A Defence

The anti‐realist argument from underconsideration focuses on the fact that, when scientists evaluate theories, they only ever consider a subset of the theories that can account for the available data. As a result, when scientists judge one theory to be superior to competitor theories, they are not warranted in drawing the conclusion that the superior theory is likely true with respect to what it says about unobservable entities and processes. I defend the argument from underconsideration from the objections of Peter Lipton. I argue that the inconsistency that Lipton claims to find in the argument vanishes once we understand what the anti‐realist means when she claims that scientists are reliable. I also argue that collapsing the distinction between relative and absolute evaluations, as Lipton recommends, has its costs. Finally, I briefly examine Richard Boyd’s influential defence of realism.

Three lectures on case control genetic association analysis

The purpose of this review is to focus on the three most important themes in genetic association studies using randomly selected patients (case, affected) and normal samples (control, unaffected), so that students and researchers alike who are new to this field may quickly grasp the key issues and command basic analysis methods. These three themes are: elementary categorical analysis; disease mutation as an unobserved entity; and the importance of homogeneity in genetic association analysis.

Renouvier and the method of hypothesis

Renouvier was among the first philosophers in France to break with the nineteenth-century inductivist tradition and defend the use of hypotheses in science. Earlier in the century, the humanistically-educated eclectic spiritualist philosophers who dominated French academic life had followed Reid in proscribing the use of hypotheses. Renouvier, who was educated in the sciences, took up the Comtean positivist alternative and developed it further. He began by defending hypotheses that anticipate laws governing the phenomena, but then eventually adopted a more liberal attitude towards hypotheses that postulate unobservable entities and processes as well. He also came to the realization that, from an epistemological point of view, all of empirical science is hypothetical. Renouvier used the tentative character of scientific knowledge as a premise from which to critique those who would claim scientific status for their social philosophies, and maintained a distinction between normative philosophical and empirical scientific inquiries.

Salmon and Van Fraassen on the Existence of Unobservable Entities: A Matter of Interpretation of Probability

A careful analysis of Salmon’s Theoretical Realism and van Fraassen’s Constructive Empiricism shows that both share a common origin: the requirement of literal construal of theories inherited by the Standard View. However, despite this common starting point, Salmon and van Fraassen strongly disagree on the existence of unobservable entities. I argue that their different ontological commitment towards the existence of unobservables traces back to their different views on the interpretation of probability via different conceptions of induction. In fact, inferences to statements claiming the existence of unobservable entities are inferences to probabilistic statements, whence the crucial importance of the interpretation of probability.

Constructive empiricism, observability and three kinds of ontological commitment

In this paper, I argue that, contrary to the constructive empiricist’s position, observability is not an adequate criterion as a guide to ontological commitment in science. My argument has two parts. First, I argue that the constructive empiricist’s choice of observability as a criterion for ontological commitment is based on the assumption that belief in the existence of unobservable entities is unreasonable because belief in the existence of an entity can only be vindicated by its observation. Second, I argue that the kind of ontological commitment that is under consideration when accepting a scientific theory is commitment to what I call theoretical kinds and that observation can vindicate commitment to kinds only in exceptional cases.

What can Bas believe? Musgrave and van Fraassen on observability

There is a natural objection to the epistemic coherence of Bas van Fraas sen's use of a distinction between the observable and unobservable in his constructive empiricism, an objection that has been raised with particular clarity by Alan Musgrave. We outline Musgrave's objection, and then consider how one might interpret and evaluate van Fraassen's response. According to the constructive empiricist, observability for us is mea sured with respect to the epistemic limits of human beings qua measuring devices, limitations 'which will be described in detail in the final physics and biology' (van Fraassen 1980: 17). In order for the constructive empiricist to determine what counts as observable, he will have to appeal to our best scientific theories of light, human physiology, and so forth. To put the same point in a slightly more abstract way, in order to draw a distinction between observable and unobservable entities, the constructive empiricist needs to use his best scientific theory of observability call it T* to tell him the identity of the observable entities. This raises an interesting difficulty. Constructive empiricism is the view that 'science aims to give us theories that are empirically adequate; and acceptance of a theory involves as belief only that it is empirically ade quate' (van Fraassen 1980: 12). When he accepts a theory, the constructive empiricist only believes the statements of his scientific theories that are about observable entities. Thus, in order to know which statements of a scientific theory to believe, the constructive empiricist needs to know which statements of that theory are about observable entities. In particu lar, then, the constructive empiricist only believes the statements of his theory of observability T* that are about observable entities. Therefore, in order to know which statements of T* he can believe, the constructive

Observational Ecumenism, Holist Sectarianism

Do any significant philosophical differences between Quine and Carnap follow from Quine's rejection of Carnap's analytic-synthetic dis- tinction? Not if they both understand empirical evidence in merely obser- vational terms. But it follows from Quine's rejection of the distinction that empirical evidence has degrees of holophrastic depth penetrating even into logic and ontology (gradualism). Thus his reasons to prefer realism to idealism are holophrastically empirical. I discuss Quine's holist sectarian realism on private languages, externalism versus internalism, unobserved objects, unobservable abstract entities, bivalence, ecumenicism versus sec- tarianism, and on gradualism itself.

Discussions Quinton’s Neglected Argument for Scientific Realism

This paper discusses an argument for scientific realism put forward by Anthony Quinton in The Nature of Things. The argument – here called the controlled continuity argument – seems to have received no attention in the literature, apparently because it may easily be mistaken for a better-known argument, Grover Maxwell’s “argument from the continuum”. It is argued here that, in point of fact, the two are quite distinct and that Quinton’s argument has several advantages over Maxwell’s. The controlled continuity argument is also compared to Ian Hacking’s “argument from coincidence”. It is pointed out that both arguments are to a large extent independent from considerations about high-level scientific theories, and that both are abductive arguments at the core. But these similarities do not dilute an important difference related to the fact that Quinton’s argument cleverly seeks to anchor belief in unobservable entities in realism about ordinary objects, which is a position shared by most contemporary scientific anti-realists.